Enterprise data centers are challenged today to support cloud-native applications, drive business velocity and work within flat budgets.

Network layer is often cited as the least agile part of data center infrastructure,especially when compared to compute infrastructure. The advent of virtualization changed the server landscape and delivered operational efficiencies across management workflows via automation. Emerging cloud-native applications are expected to demand even greater agility from the underlying infrastructure.

Most data centers are built using old network architecture, a box-by-box operational paradigm that inhibits the pace of IT operations to meet the demand of modern applications and software-defined data centers. Click here for more information on the challenges.

Software-defined data center is demanding network innovation. With virtualization going mainstream, networks are required to provide visibility into virtual machines, east-west traffic across VMs, and deliver network service connectivity easily. Networks are expected to not adversely impact software-defined data center agility by mandating manual box-by-box network configuration and upgrades. Emerging cloud-native applications require rapid application and services deployment. This demands network operations to be more automated instead of relying on manual CLI and limited GUI workflows. Lastly, infrastructure budgets trends have flat-lined in most organizations. This demands an innovative approach compared to the legacy network based on proprietary hardware that increases costs.

These network demands are met by software-defined networking (SDN) solutions. Leveraging a centralized controller, the SDN networks overcome the box-by-box operational paradigm to deliver business velocity. As applications become more distributed, SDN approaches are required for networks to become agile and automated via orchestrated workflows using RESTful APIs. By leveraging open industry-standard network hardware, SDN solutions provide vendor choice and drives down costs in a flat budget environment. This cycle of innovation has been witnessed before in the server infrastructure, driven by virtualization and containers. More recently, storage infrastructure is getting transformed as well with various software-enabled architectures.

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Lets Dig in. Below is a overview of the Clos Fabric.

What are my use cases? What type of deployments support the fabric?

Who uses the product today?

How do I deploy this with my existing data center, do I need to worry about my legacy network working with Big Switch?

Single SDN Fabric for Multi-Container Ecosystems.

Containers are a new atomic unit of computing that is ideal for emerging cloud-native, distributed applications. Data center operators are evaluating various container technologies, including Docker, Kubernetes, Mesosphere and Red Hat OpenShift.

Containers offer a layer of abstraction, not unlike to what virtual machines offered when virtualization first arrived on the scene. However, Containers are lightweight in using the host footprint because they share an underlying operating system unlike a VM which hosts its own guest OS.

Containers enable micro-services based distributed applications where an application is decomposed into multiple network-connected micro-services, with each micro-service packaged in its own container. This highly-distributed application architecture leads to tremendous increase in east-west traffic compared to monolithic applications.”

What about Bare-Metal networking Support?

Container Fabric Automation, Network visibility, and Operational Simplicity, what does that mean?

I attended DellEMC World 2017 this past week in Las Vegas courtesy of the DellEMC Elect program; but all thoughts below, short of any quotes, are my own for better or worse.

One of the highlights for me, as with many conferences, was the community aspect. From vBeers Sunday night, being invited to Howard Marks’ traditional Lotus of Siam meal on Tuesday, or the various official and unofficial get togethers put on during the week the opportunities to network were plentiful. And it was great to meet those coming into the DellEMC Elect program from the EMC side.Continue reading…

DellEMC World 2017 in Las Vegas is only a mere seven days away, and I’ll be there representing vBrainstorm and the DellEMC Elect. Continuing the theme of seven, this will be my seventh time to attend this event and second since the merger. While the early Dell World events had a distinct sale/marketing/C-level orientation, there has been a much welcomed shift toward greater technical focus and this year looks to continue the trend. A look through the session catalog shows a nice collection of storage, IoT, Big Data and (pleasant surprise) networking breakouts, along with the more managerial and sales tracks.

Expecting to see the usual updates of hardware specs across the entire product spectrum, and hoping there are a couple surprises to be unveiled. The XPS15 release in 2013 and FX2 in 2014 were both launches that caused attendees to stop and take notice, will there be anything similar this year? Perhaps the acquisition of Aerohive to end payments to HPE everytime a W-Series wireless deployment is done?

On the networking front I’m particularly excited to see all the sessions on the new OS10 and -ON platforms. When OS10 was first announced it caught my interest, a modular *nix based switch OS that can also support running compute workloads allowing services to be pushed closer to the network edge. But after the flurry of press following the initial announcement, it seemingly disappeared from view. When asked about it in an analyst Q&A session at DellEMC World in Austin last October, Michael Dell mistook the question to be about Windows 10; not exactly a good sign. So I’m hoping the number of sessions can be taken as a sign of renewed focus on OS10 and the former Force10 equipment.

“Your Virtual Volumes environment must include storage providers, also called VASA providers. Typically, third-party vendors develop storage providers through the VMware APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA). Storage providers facilitate communication between vSphere and the storage side. You must register the storage provider in vCenter Server to be able to work with Virtual Volumes.

After registration, the Virtual Volumes provider communicates with vCenter Server. The provider reports characteristics of underlying storage and data services, such as replication, that the storage system provides. The characteristics appear in the VM Storage Policies interface and can be used to create a VM storage policy compatible with the Virtual Volumes datastore. After you apply this storage policy to a virtual machine, the policy is pushed to Virtual Volumes storage. The policy enforces optimal placement of the virtual machine within Virtual Volumes storage and guarantees that storage can satisfy virtual machine requirements. If your storage provides extra services, such as caching or replication, the policy enables these services for the virtual machine.

Prerequisites

Verify that an appropriate version of the Virtual Volumes storage provider is installed on the storage side. Obtain credentials of the storage provider.

Procedure

1

Browse to vCenter Server in the vSphere Web Client navigator.

2

Click the Configure tab, and click Storage Providers.

3

Click the Register a new storage provider icon ().

4

Type connection information for the storage provider, including the name, URL, and credentials.

5

Specify the security method.

Action

Description

Direct vCenter Server to the storage provider certificate

Select the Use storage provider certificate option and specify the certificate’s location.

Use a thumbprint of the storage provider certificate

If you do not direct vCenter Server to the provider certificate, the certificate thumbprint is displayed. You can check the thumbprint and approve it. vCenter Server adds the certificate to the truststore and proceeds with the connection.

The storage provider adds the vCenter Server certificate to its truststore when vCenter Server first connects to the provider.

I ran into a need to reset the VMware Update Manger Database after a Upgrade from 6 to 6.5 vCenter Server Appliance. I thought I would share the KB.

This does remove all baselines, and all uploaded patches. Thus, document what you have. I had to do this because have the upgrade from vCenter Server Appliance 6 to vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 ; when I would scan a host, it would fail instantly.

I received this today, and thought the press release was worth sharing. Source touchdownpr.com

Today Blue Medora, an IT enterprise cloud and datacenter management company, announced a new management plug-in to support Microsoft Azure and Azure SQL. The new Blue Medora SelectStar product helps DBAs have the cost and availability of multi-cloud environments while maintaining the visibility of single-stack solutions.

SelectStar is the first cross-platform database performance software to include infrastructure insights from the two largest public cloud providers in a single view. This performance platform delivers a normalized view of more than 95 percent of production cloud-native or on-premises databases and their underlying cloud or virtualized infrastructure, which is ideal for organizations migrating their SQL stack to the cloud to save costs, and for those who support DevOps teams that depend on cloud-native databases to deploy new applications faster.

The full release is copied below for reference.

Blue Medora Expands SelectStar to Support Microsoft Azure, Azure SQL

SelectStar is the first cross-platform database performance software to include infrastructure insights from the two largest public cloud providers in a single view

Organizations are migrating production databases to the cloud for efficiency, cost and scale, but application performance and availability requirements often dictate a hybrid cloud, multi-DBMS environment. SelectStar for Azure offers a unique advantage over individualized cloud-native or on-premises proprietary solutions by enabling database administrators (DBAs) to track and optimize critical database performance and availability issues in these heterogenous environments with the same ease as a proprietary, on-prem stack.

The SelectStar performance platform delivers a normalized view of more than 95 percent of production cloud-native or on-premises databases and their underlying cloud or virtualized infrastructure. The platform is ideal for organizations migrating their SQL stack to the cloud to save costs, and for those who support DevOps teams that depend on cloud-native databases to deploy new applications faster.

“We’ve seen rapid growth in the Azure Cloud due to the increasing adoption of a multi-cloud strategy fueled by major outages and the rise of cloud-based data warehouses that were once on-prem SQL deployments” said Mike Kelly, CTO of Blue Medora and GM of SelectStar. “SelectStar’s Azure integration offers the best of both worlds, allowing DBAs to enjoy the cost and availability of multi-cloud environments while maintaining the visibility of single-stack solutions.”

Dynamic Database Dashboard: A comprehensive overview of every database in an organization’s environment, including prioritized alerts and recommendations as well as current database health in one view.

Advanced Analytics Dashboard: Report on query by name, average wait time, current wait time and lock time, executions, warnings and errors for an individual Azure SQL instance.

“Yes, this has taken me a while to get too. And it took me a while to do as well. Now that I work at Veeam, and while I have used Veeam products for many years, now I need to work my lab like a Veeam customer. vSphere 6.5 is a big deal for me, and it has a lot of new stuff in it that I am looking forward to so I have been waiting anxiously for Update 1 for Veeam that supports 6.5. It is here now but there is still one more tool of mine that is not 6.5 capable but I am tired of waiting for it. It is the VMware Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) and I find it most useful. BTW, I do this article, and then with it as a plan I do the upgrade. After that I update the article with anything I learned and then finally I publish. I will keep in this article the problems I had in case it helps someone.”

Caution: Repointing vCenter Server between Sites in a vSphere Domain is no longer supported in vSphere 6.5.

Staged upgrade across multiple maintenance Windows

If you have a complex vSphere 5.x or 6.0 environment, you may prefer to upgrade your vSphere environment over the course of several maintenance windows. It is possible to upgrade the vSphere environment in stages.

These are the general order of the upgrades:

Upgrade each vCenter Single Sign-On or Platform Services Controller one at a time.

Note: For 5.5, only if vCenter Single Sign-On is installed on a separate machine than vCenter Server.

Upgrade each vCenter Server one at a time.

Upgrade each ESXi host one at a time.

For more information about each transition step including diagrams, see the Upgrade or Migration Order and Mixed-Version Transitional Behavior for Multiple vCenter Server Instance Deployments section in the vSphere Upgrade Guide.

vCenter Server for Windows requirements

To install vCenter Server on a Windows virtual machine or physical server, your system must meet specific hardware and software requirements.